The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's interpretation of Strauss is
diverse in mood but unified by supreme artistry, says Geoffrey Norris

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Andris Nelsons has been at the helm of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra since 2008

By Geoffrey Norris

4:15PM BST 10 Apr 2014

Like his mentor Mariss Jansons, Andris Nelsons has developed a special affinity with the music of Richard Strauss, in which his conducting combines a thrilling impulse with an appreciation of the finer points of instrumental detail and evocative atmosphere.

In a mammoth work such as Also sprach Zarathustra, Strauss does lay traps for interpreters who maybe have less finely honed instincts of taste, pacing and orchestral texture than Nelsons does, but his vision of this half-hour, Nietzsche-inspired score is of such clarity and integrity as to cast aside the accusations of posturing and garishness that are sometimes levelled against it.

Nelsons has been at the helm of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra since 2008, and now has set his sights on Boston, where he will take over as music director later this year.

In his six years at Birmingham he has not merely maintained the CBSO’s high reputation but also ratcheted it up a few notches, as has been manifest in his previous Orfeo recordings of other Strauss epics such as Eine Alpensinfonie and Ein Heldenleben. On this latest release, he astutely tempers the grandeur of Also sprach Zarathustra with the romantic yearning of Don Juan and the wit of Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche.

With superb playing as a given, one transcendent quality that emerges from the performances is that Nelsons fully understands and can communicate the narrative trajectory of the music.

Establishing the connecting thread can pose a problem in such an episodic work as Also sprach Zarathustra, where naysayers might maintain that nothing in it matches up to the “sunrise” opening that Stanley Kubrick borrowed for the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. But, here, the contrasting images and states of mind that Strauss explores in the whole composition are not only soul-stirringly defined but also pieced together as a seamless whole with electrifying dramatic momentum.

As instances of Strauss’s command of orchestral colour, the three works here confirm all the richness and sophistication that he could conjure up from his palette of timbres, something that Nelsons treats with the utmost discretion and lucidity. The blending here is judicious; the shafts of solo light are beautifully etched in. Here, then, is a Strauss recording diverse in mood but unified by supreme artistry.